Personal Awareness

By request, I’m going to complain about people who just seem out of it. You know, the type that don’t seem to know where they are or who do things that don’t make sense in their current situation. The analogy suggested to me was people who honk in traffic jams.

This one is quite simple, to me. There are two forces at work. Selfishness and blatant stupidity. I’ll start with selfishness. Since the 80s, we as a society have been rewarding mediocrity. We invented Participation Awards. You no longer have to work hard. Just showing up is good enough. Don’t worry about people being better than you, you’re special. You matter. Your opinion (regardless of experience or knowledge) is just as valid as anyone else’s. Who cares if you can’t figure the difference between “your/you’re”. You’re good enough as you are.

Then these people reproduced. Now we are two generations deep in this self entitled narcissism. The person honking in the above example probably knows that his honking won’t do anything. Everyone else in traffic is just as frustrated as he is. But they are less important to him. He’s special. He has places to go. He has been told since he was a child how important he is. The fact that everyone else doesn’t agree, is their problem. He’s perfect.

These are the same people who feel the need to tell you every minute detail of their lives, and expect you to just bask in the sunshine of their existence. I’m not talking about telling a story of something weird that happened. I’m talking about the people who tell you about their day when nothing out of the ordinary happened.

“Oh. You went to work. Cool. You went to lunch too? That must have been amazing.” Ugh. Who cares? But if you tell them that you don’t care, then you’re the one who’s rude.

Here’s a perfect example of someone so out of it. This is the type of person who will drive the wrong way down a one way street. They’ll see the cars coming at them. They’ll see that none of the lights are facing them, but not be able to figure out the pattern.

The other possibility is stupidity. I never discount this option. People somehow manage to continue to surprise me with the new levels of dumb to which they are capable of reaching. You’ve heard of people falling into sewers because they were too focused on texting, and weren’t paying attention. I don’t know if we are getting dumber, or dumb people are just having so many fucking brain dead kids, but it’s getting to the point where it’s so much more noticeable.

Back in the day, we had ways of weeding these people out. Natural predators, trains, etc. But now, everyone is so safe. We’ve eliminated most natural predators. Trains have those little arms that come down to stop you. As if the big fucking train wasn’t enough to detour you from crossing the tracks. Pills have those infernal child safety lids that astrophysicists can’t open. And now the Google has all of human knowledge. The dumb can now afford to be dumber because they have no need to memorize anything anymore. Hell, even I am getting lazier. I don’t know anyone’s phone number. I just click on their picture and the Google does it for me.

The difference is I’m a genius. If I get dumber and go down a few IQ points, it’s no big deal. What about the people who are already idiots? They can’t afford to lose what little intelligence they have. But fuck it. They’re special. They are important. They matter. Just ask them.